


Up in Smoke

by DollyPop



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Het Relationship, Canon Related, F/M, Pre-Canon, Teen Romance, Teen Years, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 04:31:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6890260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DollyPop/pseuds/DollyPop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Note to self: do not test out the emotion heightening candles when attempting to resonate with the least compatible soul the DWMA has seen in centuries. </p>
<p>Stein, Marie, and the first time they try to resonate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Up in Smoke

He sighs for what must be the fifth time and waits for Marie to gather her bearings. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t focused enough on what she was doing for them to resonate properly, and the more times they tried, the more frustrated she got.

It didn’t help that he was trying out one of his new experiments, hoping it would aid the process. The emotion heightening candles were successful, but not for the reasons he wanted. Instead, each time they failed, because Marie was just strung too high, she would huff and what connection they naturally had to one another’s souls would fizz out in a sharp spark of near-violent resonance before dimming down to nothing.

He feared for his living room.

“We’ll try again,” he told her, dully. They couldn’t go on a single mission until they could resonate properly and on the fly and on command. Spirit used to be able to do so, but the scythe wasn’t exactly an option after Kami had to go and grab up the kid, calling it “saving him”, right before Stein could really collect all the weapon research he wanted. He could always try with Marie, but whenever he reached for a scalpel to do so, to approach her unlocked door because she was too trusting, he had to stop and turned to a different project, instead. She mellowed him, somehow. He knew it was something about her soul, some piece of it that he couldn’t see but could only feel, and that made him want to cut her open, but also not and it was too confusing and he was getting irritated with it all and Death knows Marie wasn’t in the highest of moods with their current activity.

The candles were a bad idea. Poor judgment, on his part.

Marie scowled at the thought of having to try again, but mostly, she was fed up with failing. She took in a heavy breath before she clenched her fists in her lap and extended her soul out to him, though it felt frazzled. She tried to open herself as best she could to him, but Stein scowled at the tension she had, and he didn’t even have the chance to reach out for her in return before his involuntary, displeased noise hit Marie’s ears and she all but shimmered with how angry she was.

“Calm down,” he snapped, his voice harsh and terse, and it was the worst possible thing to do at the moment because Marie’s usually warm, empathetic eyes bore into his when she threw her head up and her soul shuttered to him.

Oh, that wasn’t good. Damn, now she was going to be even more of a pain to work with. He didn’t do gentle and sweet and soothing. It wasn’t his fault they were failing and she knew it, too.

He rolled his eyes, standing up and putting the candles out. The sweet smoke from extinguishing them wafted up and all but singed the inside of his nose with how harsh and chemical they smelled. “Maybe we can actually get somewhere, now,” he muttered.

Marie’s soul was hot and he flinched as it filled up the room when she furiously whispered out, “You weren’t that great at it, either.”

At that, he turned around, brows furrowing. It seemed the smoke had a stronger affect on them than the candles themselves did. That was certainly a wildcard. But before he could open his mouth to inform her that perhaps leaving the room would be most prudent in their situation, she cut him off.

“Mr. ‘I can resonate with everyone’. If you’re so great, why couldn’t you do it, huh?” she asked, her eyes starting to glint wetly. But all Stein did was narrow his eyes at her.

“I’m not the problem, here, as you well realize.” The sneer was uncalled for: he knew how sensitive she was to the fact that her weapon form made her highly incompatible with most. It was all uncalled for. Were those stupid candles not there, they’d probably be fine.

Poor, poor judgment.

Her mouth pinched, her soul compressing in until it was a small ball, shrunk as far from him as it could. She shook. Her nails were undoubtedly biting into her palm and she hung her head down, hunching her shoulders up.

The room needed to air out, that was all. They just had to leave. He felt off kilter and with Marie’s usual calm influence compromised, he found himself unbalanced, as though he only had a single leg to stand on. He should have known better than to test the candles. Marie was a difficult weapon: she always had been, that was just the nature of who she was and what form she took. And to top it off, she was young. Younger than him and he was only 14: her experience was low and so was her emotional control. The entire experiment was doomed from the start, but he’d hoped he could utilize her emotions to intensify their resonance, not break it completely.

His thoughts all stopped when he heard her sniffle. His eyes went wide behind his glasses and he stared at her as though she were some undiscovered species.

She very well could be, if he were honest. He just didn’t understand her.

“Are you crying?” he asked, and anyone with a sense of hearing could hear the tinge of panic and mild horror that edged into his voice. That was just great. How were they supposed to find any kind of success if she insisted upon bawling like an infant?

And yet, the hostility he would usually feel was dulled and replaced by. . .something else.

“No!” she answered, but she kept her head down and brought a hand up to her face, wiping the back of her palm over her cheek before she did to the same to the other side. Stein fidgeted in front of her, uncomfortable.

“Marie-“

She sniffled again, turning away and hunching further. Now that he had a clear view of her back, he could make out her trembling and it made something in him clench in response. In remorse? No, not that far gone.

In guilt?

He wasn’t used to that.

Stein was glad she turned away: something about seeing her cry in front of him made him angry, but not really at her. He sighed again, looking off to the side.

He wasn’t good at this kind of shit. Emotions were in Spirit’s court. But there was no more Spirit in his life, probably never would be. Instead, he has Marie. He has Marie and he fucked up already, barely a few days into their partnership. He has Marie who agreed to be his partner even after knowing what he did to his last one, who had been nothing but pleasant and warm, and actually insisted upon cooking proper meals, and she didn’t even lock her door, and she laughed at his jokes, when he tried to make them, and she smiled at him even before she met him properly and and and

She made him feel. . .human.

Normal, would maybe be the word, but he doesn’t know what being normal entails or what it truly feels like. Perhaps it would be validation? But that wasn’t right either.

It had no matter, one way or another. The point was that Marie was upset, and he was upset because Marie was upset, and the bottom line was simply that they would get nowhere if both of them were so unstable.

He didn’t know how to comfort, but he’d seen it done, before. His mother with his father, Spirit with his friends, in shows he’d gotten glimpse of that Spirit used to watch: they were good enough models, he supposed. When he stepped forward, her soul curled in even further, and he didn’t know why he winced, but he ignored it all to reach his palm out.

The hesitation was stupid.

When his palm whispered over her back, settling over where her thoracic vertebrae were under the skin, she didn’t flinch from him, but she didn’t stop crying, either. If anything, she seemed to sob a little harder, and he brought the tentative touch in a little closer, feeling how warm and alive she was under her shirt.

His fingers twitched, unaccustomed to being upon anything that wasn’t about to be ruined immediately afterward. Stein didn’t like what he could only describe as a churn in him when he listened in to her harsh, jagged breathing, but something else swelled in him when he looked at her and saw her soul decompressing, opening, just a little. He closed his eyes, not ready to reach out, not yet.

He didn’t like seeing her cry; that much he could determine without confusion.

Her shudders stopped under his hand, but he was looking straight ahead, the corners of his mouth more downturned than usual.

When he finally reached to resonate with her, they clicked together seamlessly, his hand moving to her shoulder as she straightened up, and she gasped when she felt them mesh.

Through their connection, he felt her surprise and the faintest residue of her previous emotions, but something else, giddy and proud eradicating that sadness. He was strangely pleased at that, pleased she was settling. Pleased she wasn’t sad.

It was the candles, that heightened response.

She was a question he just didn’t know how to answer.

With the candles, or without.


End file.
